10 Ways to Improve SEO for eCommerce Product Pages
Congratulations. You’ve completed your eCommerce website. But now what? You’ve probably heard a lot about SEO for eCommerce product pages. You know you’ll have to do something to stay competitive in the online retail world.
In this article, we'll discuss some of the best practices for optimizing your e-commerce product pages for SEO, so you can maximize your online visibility and attract more potential customers.
Why SEO for eCommerce Product Pages is Crucial
If you own a brick-and-mortar shop, you’ll want to display your product in a pleasant and informative way so your customers see exactly what they want to buy. You would also want your customers to have most information they need, such as how the product looks, smells, or feels, the cost, what comes with the product, how to care for it, and its lifespan.
Similarly, product pages on an eCommerce website should provide site visitors with enough information to make a purchase decision and a simple way to complete the said purchase. Additionally, optimizing your product pages can also increase your products’ search visibility, rankability, and user experience.
Understanding the Anatomy
Like all other pages on your eCommerce website, you need to focus on user experience and Google algorithm simultaneously. Therefore, your first step to optimizing product pages is understanding their anatomy.
On the user end, your product page consists of
Product images and videos
Product description
Check out
Additional descriptions and features
Reviews and ratings
Related products
Resources
On the search engine end, you should pay attention to
SEO title and meta description
Product schema data (including brand, model, type, ratings, etc.)
Image and video alt attributes
Technical Performance
When optimizing your eCommerce website, you must pay attention to both sides for
Optimize Your Product Descriptions
Keywords, or intent, are still the most important piece in SEO for eCommerce product pages. Therefore, start with your product description if you’re hoping to increase your products’ search visibility. This also expands to properly fill out your SEO title and meta description.
A few ways to optimize your product descriptions are:
Use Relevant Keywords: Conduct keyword research to identify relevant keywords for your product and include them naturally throughout your product description.
Focus on Benefits: Highlight the benefits of your product, rather than just its features, to show potential customers how it can solve their problems or improve their life.
Be Specific and Concise: Provide specific details about your product, such as dimensions, materials, and specifications, to give potential customers all the information they need to make a purchase decision.
Use Bullet Points: Use bullet points to break up long product descriptions and make them easier to read and scan.
Don’t Ignore Your Schema Data
Depending on the eCommerce platform your website is built on, you may not need to worry about product schema data. However, if you’re using a platform that’s not specifically designed for eCommerce businesses, chances are you need to manually configure your product schemas to utilize Google’s rich snippet search results.
Core items in a product’s schema data Google looks for are:
Product Name
Product Image
Product Description
Product Brand
Product SKU
Product Price
Product Availability
Product Ratings
Product Reviews
Product Features
Product Size
Product Color
Fortunately, small business owners no longer need to hand-type schema data. There are plenty of free schema markup generators that will take the headache away from you.
Use Optimized Product Images
Of course, you should have high-quality images of your product. If that means spending the money to hire a product photographer, do it. You have to invest in your business if you want things to last. However, if you don’t pay attention to how you format these images, you will end up dragging your site speed down.
Additionally, factor in visually-impaired users, or users whose network isn’t strong enough to load all the images. In other words, fill out your image alt-attributes based on what the photos are showing with keywords in consideration to cover your grounds.
Incorporate Product Videos
Businesses speak highly of video content for valid reasons. Whether you invest in a professional product demo video, or are leveraging influencer or customer feedback off social media, having some video content on your product video can significantly boost your site visitor’s confidence and trust in your product.
If you’re worried about site speed, there are plenty of tools you can use to compress video sizes. You can also incorporate a more effective video caching policy or video lazy loading functions for better site performance. Compressed, gifs showcasing product feature is another great way to utilize video
Easy Navigation
When was the last time you walked into a five-floor antique barn, fully pumped, then felt completely burnt out an hour later because of how chaotic the space is? It doesn’t matter how great your products are if your site visitors feel like they’re walking into a Five and Dime where finding the right product on the correct shelf is all about luck.
Having simple and clear navigation on your eCommerce website, especially logical, well-organized product categories, is critical to providing a pleasant user experience. For example, categorize your products by functionality or season, then use tags to indicate size, model, color, and other attributions.
Cross-Selling and Upselling
Cross-selling is highly effective when it comes to SEO for eCommerce pages, but it’s also a sales best practice every merchant should use.
Create a recommended product section on your product page to build a relevant, well-developed internal linking structure while showing consumers other products they might be interested in. You can also create bundles with simple one-click checkout options — Amazon is an expert at that, and you see how they get people to buy, don’t you?
User Reviews and Ratings
Consumers care about reviews. Over 99.9% of customers read reviews when they shop online: if you don’t believe this number, simply reflect on how you are before buying anything online. If you use a leading review-gathering app, such as Yotpo, they should have a step-by-step guide on how to integrate the API onto your website. Furthermore, whether you’re importing third-party reviews and ratings or collecting reviews directly on your website, make sure they are also synching with your Google Merchant Account listings!
Optimize for the Mobile
As we talked about in website SEO best practices, any business that expects to succeed in the digital world must focus on the mobile end. Make sure your site design is responsive across multiple devices, and double-check on color, font, and layout on the mobile end to ensure comfortable browsing.
Turn off any unnecessary plugins, pop-ups, and visual effects on the mobile end since most people aren’t interested in seeing fireworks flashing across their phone screen when they were just looking for basic information on a business’ website.
Improve Your Sitespeed
Technical optimization should be high on your website SEO priority list, especially if you haven’t paid attention to your site performance in the past. A slow, unhealthy website will sabotage all your content optimization effort, and wouldn’t that be a pity?
A great tool to use to guide your site speed optimization is Google’s core website vital report, available in your Search Console. You can also use Google Pagespeed Insights to check your website’s desktop and mobile performances.
Secure Checkout
Hate to dampen the mood, but we do live in the high era of cybercrimes. While providing an additional layer of protection on your checkout page may not directly tie to SEO, it does increase the overall security of your website and thus impact your search visibility in the long run.
The same logic applies to your website’s SSL certificate, updated Privacy Policy, Return Policy, and Terms of Use.
Conclusion
This concludes our list of 10 best practices for SEO for eCommerce product pages. If all these talking felt too abstract, feel free to check out our eCommerce website optimization case study to see how we implemented these best practices in real life with one of our clients! Essentially, product page optimization is about getting into your customer’s head